Saturday, 3 July 2010

the hidden place II

Thanks to Peter Foolen for putting this piece of work by Tom Clark on his blog. A beautiful work citing the translations of many a Scottish place name from their roots in Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, English, French, Latin and Scots, revealing a physical, poetically descriptive and lived connectedness to landscape. As a hill walker, I've grown to know the original Gaelic names but, having only a smattering of Gaelic words in my vocabulary, was always struck by the starkly simple descriptiveness of a great many hill names in translation (Ben More = big hill, Beinn Dearg = red hill, Sgurr Mohr = big rocky hill, and so on) so this piece brings some poetry and lyricism back to my understanding of our map and reveals to me a new depth to the naming of my land.